Retired

I retired from marketing academia at 52. Why you may ask? Well, to be clear 80-90% of the reason is I don’t have to work anymore and after 10 years of horrific Lyme disease (now recovered) I wanted to reclaim that decade. Chronic illness REALLY makes you realize how short life is…But let’s talk about the other 10-20% because it’s a tad more field related….

The TLDR is I became very disillusioned with the disastrous (I originally wrote borderline disastrous, but it’s really not particularly borderline…) state of marketing journals. Our field is stocked with truly smart people who are incentivized to produce homogeneous narrow turgid nonsense by a woefully tiny (and inadequate to the size of the field) pool of king making A journals. The tiny pool means there is no meaningful competition between them, which enables review teams to discard big messy ideas, to rewrite papers without any redress, and to basically do to others as was done to them (I think often non-consciously/habitually). The journals essentially train young authors to be the next generation of narrow “theory” obsessed reviewers, it’s a vicious circle. Submitting to psych journals is such a different experience, you feel like editors don’t want to lose big interesting ideas to the deep pool of competing journals, and the reviewers know it and (mostly) focus on big issues, not asinine masturbatory process minutia. Bottom line, when basically every revision at a journal is marked as risky your field maybe has some issues?

Years ago I found myself beginning to advise my phd students to work on their limited/narrow ideas as it was much easier to publish them. “Save the big ideas for tenure” I said, “it’s so hard to publish them.” What the absolute fuck. How did our journals end up chronically allergic to research that doesn’t button down every last freaking detail? (which is in imo entirely antithetical to incentivizing breakthrough ideas.) Amazing findings with many possible explanations, or loose ends in general, are almost impossible to publish in marketing, but a tight narrow extension to an existing (already narrow) idea is much shorter odds. Can you imagine Alexander Fleming submitting his chance discovery of penicillin to JCR? He’d be desk rejected into oblivion and told to come back with a better theory as to why his discovery was, you know, saving an astounding numbers of lives - “what’s the mediating process Alexander? How about boundary conditions?” etc. I remember Jim Bettman saying in a PhD seminar that research on a phenomenon is supposed to play out over time across papers, but in our field we expect every paper to solve almost every issue. You know what that incentivizes? Boring narrow tight research that could likely also be marketed as a sleep aid.

Story time. I was once at a party in *date redacted* where I overheard a (rather large) group of JCR AE’s quite literally showing off to each other as to how few papers they had accepted in the prior year. The gloating winner was so proud to be a zero. I was genuinely quite freaked out, it seemed more like academic sadism than any kind of mentorship. But maybe there is an alternative party in the multiverse where they were showing off about how many ideas they had helped grow/thrive and get published? Hey, maybe I didn’t even retire in that universe! (Narrator “the lazy mf actually retired in that one to”).

While I ultimately think the lack of journal numbers/diversity is probably the biggest underlying issue, weak editors also don’t help. In my career as an author and reviewer, Ann McGill was the only editor I saw who genuinely/consistently pushed back on review teams and laid out a clear contract to authors which often explicitly excluded a lot of the nonsense in the reviews. Other editors were……not so good to varying degrees. One of my last ever submissions was inexplicably on the editors desk for over 4 months, and when we complained we got a review which appeared to have been written without so much as bothering to read the paper…..certainly it made no reference to the paper, though it did have some lovely cut and pastes about the apparently masterful job the AE had done….It was also, you will be shocked, a “very” risky revision.

Since I guess I’m getting horror stories off my chest (therapy, right?), a friend of mine was once a reviewer on a JCR submission (their review was, shall we say, not especially positive) and was accidentally copied on a letter from the AE to the editor saying the paper ought to be accepted as one of the authors was extremely famous in an adjacent field. My reviewer friend mysteriously never even saw the paper again until being surprised to see it in published form. That paper, in my admittedly N of 1 judgment, was probably desk rejection material, but the PhD student who was on it got a nice recruiting boost with that lovely shiny A! of course, one might worry about his/her peers who didn’t submit a paper with a super famous adjacent field co-author? Oh well, it’s only their careers after all…..

My other bone of contention is the entirely feeble/hand-waving efforts being made to negate p-hacking (and outright fraud). How hard is it to mandate pre-registration and the sharing of ALL data? (whether experimental, quantitative, or interview transcripts). Please spare me the excuses about confidentiality. The journals seem to want the field to mysteriously police itself. Hey editors and policy boards (especially policy boards)- you are actually in the box seat to set higher standards! Do better! Absent that, one can only assume some people in power simply like things the way they are..…

So what is to be done? In my N of 1 opinion the number of A journals needs at a minimum to be doubled to create genuine inter-journal competition. The JCR (journal concentration ratio (c)) is a disaster as is. I’m also pretty sure our per capita A journal space per faculty has fallen to historic lows (sorry I couldn’t be bothered to spend weeks gathering historic data to prove this, I am after all retired by a pool/beach depending on the season). This could notionally be fixed by (as was done once before decades ago) doubling the size of the existing journals, but that would clearly not fix the competition issue. So I’m pretty convinced we need to get the extra space from more A journals, not just more pages in the current journals. Of course powerful fans of the status quo (“leave my vita alone!”) would likely just not count the new journals as being A’s, but that’s not a problem that couldn’t be solved with a little field bravery. If the top 30 schools put out a joint release that henceforth they would count JCP/Psychology and Marketing (or whatever) as unambiguous A’s submission patterns would change real fast, as would the behavior of the current incumbent A’s. Competition actually works a lot of the time, but duopolies tend fail on that front. It’s almost like we don’t remotely practice what we teach….crazy right.

To finish on a positive note, there really are a lot of smart people in the field, and if the journals did a better job incentivizing big ideas, then real world marketers might yet start, you know, reading them. Is there is an academic field less read by their practitioner community than marketing?